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In studying companies that are already successful, you can see
patterns that can be replicated. Picasso is credited with having
said something to the effect that good artists copy; great artists steal.
And that concept is certainly relevant to building a startup.

After all, why reinvent the wheel when you can take some of
what’s worked for others and apply the same principles to your
business?

With that in mind, here are 13 growth
hacks from leaders of some of today's successful technology
businesses:

1. Mark Zuckerberg: Have a major, long-term goal. What's
Facebook's goal? As Mark Zuckerberg has said, it's to
"connect everyone, understand the world and help build the
knowledge economy."

That big, long-term goal is what guides every decision he makes.
It also informs what Facebook values, which in turn influences
the company's direction. An organization with the goal of
connecting everyone will make the types of decisions that could
lead to the addition of scores of new users each quarter.

What's your company's long-term goal? Are you making decisions
that reflect this? Start working toward your goal, and you'll
perhaps reach it sooner than you imagined.

2. Jack Dorsey: Start an idea.
Twitter co-founder and Square CEO Jack Dorsey has demonstrated
the power of focusing on an idea instead of a company.
Twitter's service was initially developed as a way for people
to send messages to a group of friends. Square's service began
as a way for micro-businesses to process credit-card payments.

Once Dorsey started working on a good idea, "the company kind of
just formed around it," he said.

A really great idea can lead to a natural progression, but
building a company first and then plugging in a rather average
one will slow things down.

3. Kevin Systrom and Mike Kreiger: Make it fun. If
your business isn't growing as quickly as you'd like, ask an
important question, Is your product fun? In a world of abundant
choices for consumers, people tend to gravitate toward a product
or service that's fun to use.

That's how Kevin Systrom and Mike Kreiger took Instagram from an
ordinary photo app to a household brand. Point Global Marketing
summed up the strategy of Instagram's co-founders as follows:
"Take a great idea that already exists and come up with a
‘fun’ feature."

4. Nicholas Woodman: Hack your
time. You can spend more time growing your
company if you hack the rest of your life to eliminate
roadblocks. When GoPro founder and CEO Nicholas Woodman was
building his firm, he wore a CamelBak of Gatorade and water so
that he never would have to stop what he was doing to find a
drink.

To grow a company, figure out what's keeping you from getting
work done and then hack your schedule. Set aside blocks of
uninterrupted time, hire someone to screen your calls and
strap on your own CamelBak and get to work.

5. Julia Hartz: No customer is too
small. You may think you've done well in promoting
your product to a specific market, but if you don't make it
accessible for everyone to use, you're limiting it growth
potential.

When Julia Hartz co-founded Eventbrite, she aimed for
the "democratization" of event ticketing.
No event was too small to make it onto Eventbrite's site. Her
company also set an important policy: People did not need to
pay to use the service if their event was free.

This policy of welcoming all users, no matter how small, helped
push Eventbrite ahead of its competitors. To maximize the growth
of your company, adopt a similar strategy.

6. Brian Chesky: Solve a real
problem. The trio that founded Airbnb, Brian
Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk and Joe Gebbia, didn't see
the startup grow until its service was advertised as a solution
to a real problem: connecting tourists with residents with spare
rooms so that more people could visit Denver during
the 2008
Democratic National Convention.

This helped establish Airbnb as a trusted company and set it up
for rapid expansion. If your company wants to grow quickly,
simply find a problem and solve it.

7. Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick: Offer the best
possible product. Here's what investor Bill Gurley
told TechCrunch about the
fast-growing startup Uber, co-founded by Garrett Camp and
Travis Kalanick: "The product is so good, there is no one
spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on marketing."

In other words, if you have a product that's so wonderful it
sells itself, you'll see growth beyond your wildest dreams.

8. Ari Talja: Have a really good database
system. To support a startup's growth, you need a
really good back-end tracking system to handle data like customer
information, subscriptions and billing. As Ari Talja, a lead
server architect at Rovio Entertainment, told Computer Weekly, "We knew that we needed
to be prepared for massive usage and be ready to scale up
quickly when needed."

Without Rovio Entertainment's having an infrastructure ready to
scale, its Angry Birds would never have flown.

Is your company growing organically? Or are you trying to force
your way to the top?

10. Nguyen Ha Dong: Know when to stop. Why
did the Flappy Bird developer pull his app from the market
Because, as he told the South China Morning Post,
the app's runaway success "ruined my simple life."

Not all growth is good. Too much growth, too quickly, can destroy
a company -- and spoil your life. Follow the Flappy Bird
developer's example and know when you should pull back.

11. Drew Houston: Hire the best
people. Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox, recently
told Technology Review how to recruit
suitable employees: "You have them swing by the office for
drinks, do various things, and you introduce them to the
company, and you sort of tastefully educate them on everything
that’s going on in the company."

Without top talent on board, your company will never be able to
fulfill its growth potential. Even one or two great new hires can
make all the difference.

12. Jon Oringer: Spend money
efficiently. Jon Oringer famously started
Shutterstock without outside funding. He has said he doesn't
believe that venture capital is necessary to start a
business and that it's possible to grow a company with a
small budget by learning how to spend every
dollar efficiently.

13. Rashmi Sinha: Understand what stage your business is
in. SlideShare founder Rashmi Sinha explained at
a talk at Stanford University that all
businesses go through a series of stages. Growth hacks that
work at one stage won't work for another. Using data to
understand the stage your business is in will help you plan
how to steer it to the next stage.